The Ffestiniog Englands are the oldest working narrow gauge engines in the world. They’re rare, historically important trains, and they’re 150 years old this year.

Chris Thorpe’s Flexiscale Co is preserving them, using some of the most modern technology at their disposal. They’re 3D scanning them, to produce highly accurate software models, which can then be 3D printed at any scale desired to produce plastic models.

Chris is running a Kickstarter project to help with the scanning, and the backers can get a model at various scales as a reward. They are also a number of other rewards, one of which is a Newspaper Club newspaper about the project, with lovely photos of the process and some of the renderings.

What a brilliant example of the physical-digital flip-flop. A physical object is scanned as a 3D point cloud, software rendered to a 3D mesh, coloured in and converted to JPGs, uploaded and laid out in our layout software, ARTHR, sent digitally to our press on Tuesday, printed Tuesday night, sent out for delivery on Wednesday, arrived Friday morning, and now will be posted out to the backers of a project, all of whom discovered it online. And breathe.

Chris has reached his goal on Kickstarter, but there’s still time to back the project and get a model and a newspaper of your own.

Something we’re often asked about is printing images that run all the way across the sheets of a newspaper, like a series of posters. Setting up a file to print as full spread posters is simple once you know how. But it is so, so hard to explain with words!

I am going to show you how to make a dummy, or mock-up of your newspaper, and then we need never confuse each other ever again.

1. Start by taking some blank sheets of paper. They can be any size or shape, it doesn’t matter too much. You want to have as many sheets of paper as you want to make posters – I’m going to make 3 double sided posters, so I have 3 sheets of paper here.

2. Sketch out a rough version of how each poster is going to look on the sheets.

3. Make sure you also sketch out how the back of each poster will look, if they have any artwork or text on them.

4. Now you should have a pile of sheets that are little rough versions of the pile of posters you want to order from Newspaper Club.

5. Gather the sheets together in the order and direction you want them to be printed in.

6. Now fold the whole pile in half.

7. Ta-da! This is your dummy newspaper.

8. Check through to make sure you’re happy with the order of the sheets – if not, you can rearrange them at this point until you’re happy with the way it looks.

9. Now, take a pen and number the bottom corner of every page. The numbers are the page numbers for your file. So page 1 in your dummy should look like page 1 in your file, page 2 should look like page 2, and so on.

10. Now look through your paper – you can see which page each part of each poster should be in your file.

11. Now you can pull the paper apart and see which page each half of each side belongs on.

So now you know how incredibly easy it is to work out how to make some posters, hopefully we can put an end to the sleepless nights and confused exchanges. However, if you are still unsure, please just drop us an email at support@newspaperclub.com. I can’t promise we can make this any clearer, but we do always get there somehow in the end. : )

A few months into starting Newspaper Club I was showing a designer friend, someone whose opinion I respect and admire, some of the newspapers we’d printed. He liked the ones I showed him and remarked that he’d like to be “exposed to some of this stuff” on a regular basis.

That was a phrase that stuck with me. As we’ve grown it’s become harder and harder for anyone to get “exposed to some of this stuff”. Probably no-one sees everything we print. We’ve been working hard to expose some of this stuff with the Newsagent, which is brilliant, but because we print so many it doesn’t capture everything and it would takes you ages to look through all the papers on there.

So I’ve decided to feature a few newspapers in a blog post. Chosen by me alone based purely on how good the cover looks in Newsagent. I know nothing about these newspapers, I don’t know who made them or where they ended up.

But I thought you’d like to be “exposed to some of this stuff” on a regular basis.